Backup

With the things that are most important to us, like family photo albums and digital music collections, becoming increasingly digitised in the home, it’s become a necessity for backup solutions to ensure that there’s a safety net in place to make sure that crucial data is never lost.

At the very simplest, backup solutions can take the form of copying data to blank CDs, USB drives or external hard drives.  However, these solutions have big limitations - the lifetime of a CD-R or -RW disc might conservatively be 20-50 years if kept in a jewel case in good conditions.  USB flash drives are easy to lose and their longevity and reliability varies greatly.  External hard drives are a good solution, but a single-drive external backup solution is still susceptible to disk failure, particularly if they are subjected to shocks or other adverse conditions.

Few attempts have been made to commercialise and simplify the best solutions which involve several hard drives: mirrored or distributed parity RAIDs with a minimum of two (mirrored) or three (distributed parity/RAID 5) drives.

We would be more than happy to advise on, set up and supply the best available systems and configure them to work with your Mac and PC setups.